OpenAI has opened commercial operations in São Paulo, its first office in Latin America and its first anywhere in the Americas outside the United States, the company announced this week.
The launch formalizes a market where OpenAI already has deep reach. Brazil is ChatGPT’s third-largest market by weekly active users, with about 215 million messages sent daily and a user base that has nearly doubled over the past year, according to the company. Brazil ranks second worldwide by number of developers using the OpenAI API, and weekly users of OpenAI’s coding tool, Codex, have grown more than elevenfold since the start of 2026.
Local deals with universities, a hospital and a city government
The São Paulo office will handle enterprise sales, billing and support through a Brazilian commercial entity rather than resellers. Alongside the launch, OpenAI announced several local partnerships: the ITA engineering school will get ChatGPT Edu accounts and credits for its reasoning models and Codex; the IMPA mathematics institute will study how AI can speed up scientific research; Hospital das Clínicas, part of Brazil’s public health system, will trial a clinical-information prototype; and São Paulo’s city government signed a cooperation agreement on municipal administration tools through its technology agency, Prodam. OpenAI also announced its first media partnership in Brazil, with newspaper Folha de S.Paulo and portal UOL. None of the partnerships disclosed financial terms.
Part of a broader international push
The Brazil launch follows OpenAI’s move earlier this year to expand ChatGPT ads to 31 European markets and sits alongside other localized efforts such as its ChatGPT for Small Business program — part of a wider pattern of turning fast-growing usage into local commercial and government ties. A RegLab study funded by OpenAI estimates AI could add nearly 1 trillion reais (about $194 billion) to Brazil’s economy by 2030, though the study’s authors describe that figure as a ceiling rather than a conservative baseline.